A huge THANK YOU for that review. I found myself nodding at every point. The bard and the avenger are most certainly the design highlights of the book or, so far, of the edition.

But what I liked most is that finally finally FINALLY an industry insider has had the guts to call out WotC on their embarassing prose style in 4E products. The German translation has gone to extreme lengths to (successfully) render the hilarious PHB 1 into a product that you can read without (as you so aptly put it) laughing out loud at all the stylistic blunders. Thank heaven WotC did the only reasonable thing and put that superior product off the market right away!

So yes, I hope your review gets all the notice it deserves. I’ve started to link it on a couple of forums, but the following lines ought to be plastered right onto anyone’s shelf of 4E books.

“it’s a shame that a game that once prized itself on appealing to an educated audience is no longer even aiming for that. Basically, the PHB2 assumes you are sort of an idiot, whereas Gygax always assumed you were smarter than the average reader. The shift leaves me a little offended.”